The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

by Siri Hustvedt

  “Whatever has happened, Lily,” Mabel said in a low wise voice, “you’re not involved or to blame, except possibly in that boy’s imagination.” Mabel whispered this with her eyes half open.

  “Imagination?” Lily repeated. “What does imagination have to do with it? Why are you so calm?” Lily stepped back from the bed. “What’s wrong with you? You were there. You saw exactly what I saw, and yet you don’t care very much, do you?”

  Mabel studied Lily intently, but with a quiet in her eyes that Lily read as condescension.

  “Well, I care!” she said in a loud voice.

  “Lily, don’t you see? He wanted us to look at him. It was a, a performance of some kind, something staged. We called the police. What more can we do now?”

  Lily narrowed her eyes. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “I don’t even know who you are…” She didn’t finish. Mabel’s face turned whiter. Lily ran out of Mabel’s apartment and slammed the door. She heard Mabel calling her name, but she ignored the voice and fled to her own room.

  Through the wall Lily thought she heard Mabel crying. She wasn’t sure, but there were low noises coming from next door. Nevertheless, she did not go back to Mabel that night. She listened to the last of the sniffling sounds and walked to her mirror. There she removed the robe she had borrowed from Mabel and looked at her naked reflection. She examined her body sharply and coldly and then, lifting her right hand, she slapped herself hard in the face. After the slap, she moved closer to the mirror to study the mark on her cheek. And then, before she crawled into bed, she slapped herself again—for good measure.

  * * *

  Lily slept more soundly than she would have thought possible and woke at her usual hour for work. Her head ached and her limbs felt heavy, but her mind was empty. She walked to the window first thing, without turning on any lights, and knelt beside the curtain, the way she used to before she knew Ed. Then she pulled it back to see if he was awake and painting. Through his window, she saw him in his underwear holding a brush near the hidden canvas. She was glad she couldn’t see the picture. It was only then that she remembered Martin in his costume with the girl in his arms. Looking at Ed, she thought, it’s already gone, now, this moment. There isn’t really a “now” at all. Even saying the word “now” is too slow for it. Now slips into then so fast, it’s nothing at all. And as ordinary as this observation was, Lily felt she was living it, and its truth hit her hard. Time was inexpressible. She turned away from Ed, headed for the shower and remembered that she had been fired. There was no Ideal Cafe for her, no job, but Lily decided to go and beg Vince to take her back. She had never begged for anything in her life, and because Vince knew her, she figured a display of humility might overwhelm him. But what if he had already hired somebody else?

  When Lily opened the back door to the cafe and peered cautiously through it, she saw no new girl. She saw Bert shaking her head at her. “If you knew the trouble you’ve caused around here, you’d regret it,” she said. “Ever since you left, Vince has been on the warpath, and you know what that does to Boom—he gets all shaky and whiny. What were you thinking of, girl?” Bert leaned close to Lily and turned her head to one side. “You don’t look good, you know that? For once in your life, you look like a wreck.”

  Lily looked at Bert, and as she looked, she realized her eyes felt very dry, as though there weren’t enough liquid in them. She grabbed Bert’s arm and said, “I saw her last night.”

  “Saw who?”

  “The dead girl. I told you, remember? Martin was dressed up in his costume for the play, and he, he was carrying her body—at the creek. Mabel saw it, too, only I don’t think she believed her own eyes.”

  Bert took Lily by the shoulders with both hands. “I’ve seen it coming. You haven’t been yourself. You haven’t called me for days. That’s not normal, and I’ve been calling you, but you’re never home. She’s in love, I said, out of her mind in love, but it’s not just that. There’s something in your eyes, too.” Bert withdrew her hands. “Like you’re not right. Like you’re possessed with this, this idea.”

  “What?” Lily said. “You don’t believe me? You think I would make this up? Somebody’s dead, murdered, and you think I’m kidding? Possessed? What are you talking about? You think I’m lying?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  Vince walked through the door. “You!” he bellowed at her, pointing a fat index finger in her direction. “Get out! I fired you!”

  Lily shuddered at the big voice, but she didn’t move. “I came to apologize,” she said. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.” Her voice broke, and she tried desperately to recover an even tone. “Lately…” she said.

  Vince strode toward her. Lily could see real anger in his face. Sometimes Vince played at anger, roared for his own amusement to stir things up in the cafe, but now he meant it, and withstanding the pitch of his emotion was hard, terribly hard. Lily was shaking. “Lately, my life,” she said, “has been…” She searched for a word. What was the word? Finally she said, “Going to pieces because, because…” Lily began to wave her hands at her sides, then near her face. When she felt the tears coming, she clutched either side of her face and started sobbing. “Oh, Vince!” she said. “Oh, Vince!”

  The man’s expression changed. He looked at Bert with his mouth open and said, “What the hell is this?”

  Bert gave Vince a sour look and took Lily into her arms. When she felt Bert’s embrace, Lily squeezed her friend hard. After several seconds she felt Vince’s large, tentative hand touch her back.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” he said. “Where’s that crusty, hard-assed cookie that I’ve come to know and love? I mean, holy shit, Lily, you’ve got more fiber in you than this.”

  Bert said, “Give the kid a break, Vince. Everybody’s got their limits. I mean, you’d scare the living daylights out of a sumo wrestler with the look you gave her.”

  Vince removed his hand.

  Lily felt her sobs subside, and she pulled away from Bert to look at Vince. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll never walk out on you again. I’m not myself, it’s true, but I’m going to be myself again, I promise.” She sniffed loudly. She looked up at Vince.

  “Hey there,” he said. “Your mascara’s running. Now get your butts back to work. I got Bert to cover for you,” he said to Lily. “So I’ve got two waitresses from five to eight when I only need one, and I’m going to pay you both. So I never want to hear another word out of either of you about me being a cheapskate. You got that?”

  Bert and Lily nodded.

  Bert heard almost the whole story from Lily that morning during the shift—told in bits and pieces between tables and on runs to the kitchen. Lily could see that Bert was troubled by what she heard, but it wasn’t clear what she actually thought of it. She shook her head and asked Lily about forty times if she was absolutely sure she’d seen a face in the tarp. “Couldn’t it have been something else? A dog, maybe, or some animal Martin pulled out of the creek?” The other part of the story Bert couldn’t get over was Lily’s visits to the Bodlers. “Why would you go there? Don’t you get enough of them here?” Lily responded to these questions with shrugs. The shoes were inexplicable. To talk about them would only confirm Bert’s worry that Lily was having some kind of breakdown. “They know Martin,” she said. “They’re his great-uncles or something like that.”

  Before Lily left, Bert said, “Maybe you should talk to someone, Lily.”

  “I’ve talked to you, Bert.”

  “No, I mean like a minister or counselor or something.”

  “You think I’m out of my gourd.”

  “Would you stop telling me what I think. I’m not saying that.”

  “You think Pastor Carlsen’s going to fix this? Can’t you just see him?” Lily lowered her voice and gave herself a sincere expression. She nodded gravely. “Let us turn to the Lord in his infinite wisdom.”

  “He’d be more practical than that,” Bert
said.

  “The man wouldn’t have a clue,” Lily said.

  “I’m calling you today,” Bert said.

  Lily nodded and walked through the back door and up to her apartment. She knew exactly what she was going to do. She had two stops that afternoon. The first was the Stuart Hotel. For the second, she needed her flashlight.

  * * *

  When Ed answered the door, he didn’t look like himself. It wasn’t only that he seemed worn out and the skin under his eyes had turned blue-black or that he hadn’t shaved in days. Lily had seen him exhausted and unkempt before. She had a sense that some familiar quality in his appearance had disappeared overnight, and the man who began speaking to her was a stranger. Before she could say hello, he told her that Mabel had called and told him about last night.

  Lily looked behind him at the portrait of Mabel with the blank boxes above her head. She didn’t feel like crying anymore. She felt empty.

  “Lily”—Ed leaned toward her and brushed her cheek gently with the backs of his fingers—“I have something to tell you. After I hung up with Mabel, I starting thinking, and I’m pretty sure that that kid was here, Martin Petersen. But he gave me another name, said his name was Hal Dilly.”

  “Hal Dilly,” she repeated. “There’s a Dilly family in Webster, but no Hal. They run the old people’s home. Did he stutter?”

  “No, but one morning around ten last week, Wednesday, I think, this kid knocked on my door and asked me if I would show him the paintings, said his name was Hal Dilly, that he wanted to study art.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Not much, but he studied all the paintings very carefully, and then afterward, he kept looking around the room like he was expecting to find something else.” Ed rubbed his forehead. “He asked me if there weren’t more. I said no, and he left.” Ed paused. “Mabel isn’t sure about what she saw. She said it was so fast, just a couple of seconds, that she couldn’t be sure…”

  “I saw her,” Lily whispered.

  “I know.” He frowned. “While he was here, I didn’t think about it very much, but after he was gone, I had a funny feeling that something wasn’t right, that he was making fun of me, laughing up his sleeve, but then I told myself I was being paranoid.” Ed sat down and looked at his painting. His large eyes were wide open and still. “Don’t go near him,” Ed said, without looking at her. Then he looked up at her, reached out, clutched her arm and kissed it.

  A few minutes later, Lily walked out the door and did exactly what Ed had warned her not to do. She headed out of town on her bicycle.

  * * *

  Heath Creek changed in daylight. As Lily walked along the bank through the brush where Martin had walked only hours before, she found it odd that she could see what was around her. Her eyes felt sore, and the steadily darkening sky caused a turbid gloom over the trees and water, muting their colors to grays and browns. Somewhere above her on the other side of the creek she heard children playing, and Lily wondered why children always sound the same when they play, that it didn’t seem to matter who they were or where they lived. She walked on, stepping quickly through the underbrush along the curve in the creek. As she neared the cave, she stumbled over an old sign from the Sheriff’s Department, its warning rusted into illegibility, and as she looked down at it, she heard the children above her chanting. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but their rhyming verses were ridiculing somebody, and she listened to their cruelty with a mysterious pang of guilt. Lily crouched in front of the boarded, nailed entrance to the cave.

  She saw the little door right away. Someone had cut it out of the boards. It had real hinges and was standing ajar, as if the dwarf who lived inside was expecting visitors. She opened the door further and was met by the moist, cool air of the cave. Before she crawled inside, she shone her flashlight into the first low, wide room near the entrance. She remembered it. There was no sign that anyone had been in here for a long time. From that first room, you could crawl through a passageway to another. Nobody she knew had ever ventured beyond the second one, but that room was larger—an adult could stand up in it. She shone her light toward it, then turned it off. Another light shone from the second room. After stuffing the flashlight into her back pocket, Lily began to crawl through the passage. She heard the steady trickle of water coming from somewhere nearby. The damp cave floor made her knees raw, and her shoulders grazed the sides of the tunnel. When she had almost reached the turn where the passage opened onto the second room, she heard someone begin to whistle the only song from the only opera Lily had ever been able to name, and that melody was so strongly identified with Ed, meant Ed and no one else, that for several seconds Lily didn’t accept that she was hearing it. The cave walls distorted the sound. Its origin could have been anywhere. She froze and held her breath. The noise was like the door—sensual information she resisted. But Lily knew that she was going to lurch headlong into whatever was waiting for her, and an instant later she pushed herself around the turn in the passage and saw Martin sitting there beside a small kerosene lamp that was flickering in some inexplicable draft. The room was filled with objects, piles of material, cardboard boxes, spools of thread, paints, but Lily didn’t examine them closely. Martin had stopped whistling, but he didn’t seem to see her. He wasn’t moving, but his huge shadow on the cave wall trembled and leapt. He kept his eyes on the ground for a couple of seconds, then looked up at her and said, “I knew you’d come, Lily.”

  “What have you done with her?” Lily whispered at him.

  Martin narrowed his eyes and turned his head. Lily inched forward into the room to see what Martin was looking at. Against the far wall of the cave, slumped in a wheelchair was the girl Lily had seen the night before.

  Lily cried out and clapped her hands over her mouth. She started crawling for the passageway, but she felt Martin’s hands on her shoulders. He pulled her toward him, his grip much stronger than she had expected. She fought him hard, but Martin dragged her across the floor of the cave toward the body. Lily closed her eyes. She hit and wept, and then she felt Martin stop suddenly. He was behind her, holding her arms tightly. She kicked him. “L-l-look,” he said. “L-look.”

  “No!”

  “Look!” Martin let go of Lily. She opened her eyes and looked at the girl in the wheelchair. She recognized the chair as the one Martin had bought from Frank and Dick. Martin had his hands on either side of the girl’s face, and Lily saw that this was the face of a doll, a beautifully made life-size doll whose proportions, unlike most dolls, were accurately human. And that it was a girl, not a woman, with a small only half-developed body.

  “It’s a doll,” Lily said.

  Martin nodded. “B-but you knew.”

  “It’s a doll.” Lily stared at the modeled face with its painted eyes and parted lips, its long, dark hair that fell over its shoulders. My costume, she thought. It’s wearing Hermia’s dress. And while she looked, she saw—all at once—that the thing looked like her or maybe like her a few years ago. Nobody’s dead, she thought. Nobody’s dead, and she felt a vibration in her jaw and in her temples. She didn’t speak. Neither did Martin. She looked at the doll. There was something wrong with it, but she couldn’t say what it was. It’s cold in here, she said to herself. My mouth is dry. She moved her tongue back and forth in her mouth and then she said, “Where did you get it?”

  “I-I-I,” he said, “m-m-made y-you. It t-t-took a long time—a y-y-ear.”

  “What?” Lily said. She looked at Martin. Why is he stuttering now? she wondered. I’m dizzy. She took a step backward. Then she tried to focus on Martin. “I thought you had killed somebody, Martin. You showed me that picture. You said she wasn’t alive. Last night…” Lily felt confused. The moving light didn’t help. There’s something wrong with my eyes, she thought. “What have you done?” Lily looked at the doll again. “What is it?”

  “H-her face, arms and legs are made from Sculpey—i-it’s pretty new stuff…”

  Lily hadn’t meant f
or him to explain how he’d made it. “No,” she said, but he continued his explanation.

  “I-it’s like clay, but you can f-fire it at home in the oven.”

  Lily imagined Martin removing the doll’s head from his oven, then an arm. She put her hand to her forehead. “You didn’t ask me. You, you’ve done this behind my back. You were whistling.… That’s Ed’s song.” Lily shook her head and showed Martin her palms, as if they could ward him off. “You’ve been spying on me for, for a long time. I’ve, I’ve heard you sneaking around.” She looked up at him. He seemed taller in the cave. “Why?” Lily stepped backward and heard plastic rustle under her feet. The air inside the cave was hurting her lungs.

  But Martin did not answer the questions. He walked toward her and said, “You spy, too. You spied on him.”

  Lily watched Martin’s face. He was the whitest of all white men, and he was everywhere at once, seeing, knowing. “Who are you?” she asked again. “What do you mean by this? What is it for?” She took a step toward the doll. The thought that it might have some purpose seemed terrible.

  The doll was resting on the back of the chair, its face turned upward toward the cave’s moist, dripping ceiling, and Lily looked down at the long hair that fell over the chair’s cane back. The wig, she said to herself. The grotesque possibility that Frank and Dick had known all along raced through her. “Do the twins know about this?”

  Martin shook his head. “O-only you. L-Lily, you must listen to me.”

  “Tell me, then,” she whispered and lifted her face to his. “Tell me.”

  Martin seemed to find this command funny. He laughed—a short, bitter burst of humor, and then it vanished. He lifted the doll out of the chair and held it in his arms. Mabel had been right—the body was lighter than a child’s. “Sit down,” he said smoothly.

  Lily shook her head. She didn’t want to sit in the wheelchair, didn’t want any part of it. “I’ll stand.”

  Martin’s face registered disappointment, but only for a second. He placed the doll gently back in the chair, arranged its hands in its lap and then let the head droop on its chest as though it were asleep. He talked to her in that rhythmical intonation she had become accustomed to, rubbing his hands and fixing his eyes on her as he spoke. He stepped toward her, but Lily backed away. “She’s the one between, Lily.”